No updates for the past while because I’ve been up to my tonsils with work. Not that I’m complaining. One of the “joys” of having your own business is the fact that you never know what’s round the corner. My business is just over three years old now, and a lot of that 3 years was spent cold-calling prospective clients, which was neither pleasant nor productive for me. Since Christmas I have done no cold-calls, and customers are beating a path to my door. I’m not sure why this is the case but I watched “The Secret” a while back and read “The Science of Getting Rich” so I’m putting it down to that.

Anyhow, I did get time last week to browse through PC Live, (Great value for just €3), and came across this article. According to a University of Maryland study, a PC connected to the internet will on average be attacked every 39 seconds.

The study also profiled brute force attacks and found the most common methods of guessing passwords. The most common was to re-enter the username or a variation of it, (eg user: admin, pwd: admin123). Other common password guesses were ‘password’, ‘passwd’, ‘test’, ‘123’, 1234′, ‘12345’, ‘123456’ and ‘1’.

Nothing too surpirsing I suppose in the guesses, but the frequency of the attacks was interesting. It also proves again the need for effective passwords, and we’ve discussed before. Make it long, mix letters, numbers and special characters, and change it on a regular basis.

Having a WordPress-based blog about computer security, it would be a bit of an oversight if I didn’t mention the recent problems encountered by my gracious hosts.

Last week the server hosting the WordPress 2.1.1 download was hacked, and the code was modified to include code for remote PHP execution. According to Matt Mullenweg it appears that only two files were changed and measures have been implemented to try to prevent a recurrance. Any users of 2.1.1 should immediately upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2.

The point of this blog is that everyone can do all the simple things to protect themselves from the casual attack. This type of attack however sounds like Wordpress was a very specific target, which makes it much more difficult to defend yourself against.

I’m sure WordPress had already invested heavily in their security infrastructure, (Firewalls, Intrusion Detection etc), so now they’re going to have to go back and look at that investment and see where it failed them. Do they need to spend more on technology to prevent a recurrance, (not necessarily always the answer), or is it a matter of ensuring more effective processes are in place.

According to Matt’s blog, a number of measures have already been implemented to stop the same thing happenning again. Time will tell if they’ve done enough.

Just finished reading The Husband by Dean Koontz, (Didn’t he used to have an ‘R’ in there or am I imagining that?) Anyway, there’s one line in it that I thought had parallels with computer security. The hero is walking out of a house and doesn’t lock the door behind him, “…perhaps recognising that he couldn’t keep out those he wished to bar, only those who had no desire to enter.”

Computer Security is not quite that bad, but the truth is, if “they” want to get in badly enough, you’ll have to spend an awful lot of time, money and effort to stop them. Thankfully, usually these guys are more interested in the low-hanging fruit. There’s enough of that around to keep them busy so they don’t need to put the effort into actually breaking in. Why bother when there are so many open doors. Ironically, in the book, the guy who left his doors open turned out to be paranoid about computer security later on.

Ever heard of phishing? It’s the process whereby someone tries to lure you into divulging personal details, (username, password, account details etc), usually by sending you a mail that appears to come from your bank explaining that their servers are to be upgraded, and asking you to follow the link and re-enter all your details.

Well, last week a major pharming attack hit users of 65 banks in the US, Europe and Australia. Pharming is kind of a step up from phishing, because you don’t need to click on a link in an email. Basically what it does is recognise when you wype in the url for your banks site, and redirect those requests a duplicate site. In last weeks case, all the information keyed in by users was subsequently forwarded to the banks in question, which of course makes the problem harder to detect. But by the time the banks received the information entered it had already been captured by the guys behind the scam.

The whole thing seems to have been launched through a trojan known as Burglar.A, which in turn downloaded a number of other Trojans. Keylog.LN, which captures keystrokes and looks for user login details, Banker.CLJ which carries out the pharming scam, FileStealer, which installs a web-server on the PC giving the authors remote control of the server, and Sters.P, designed to prevent users and programs from contacting their websites for security updates.

So overall this was a really nasty little piece of code. The Internet is a fabulous place, but to quote Hill Street Blues….Let’s be careful out there!

Last week I was explaining to a client about how hackers operate, and they simply didn’t believe that anyone would want to hack into their systems. After all, they’re a micro-business operating in the south-east of Ireland. In global terms they are a complete non-entity.

One of the great things about the internet is that you don’t have to be a multi-national corporation to have a multi-national presence. A single PC in the kitchen can provide services to companies all over the world. And that’s what makes every PC a target for hackers. The Washinton Post reported on this last week:

“Last month, a number of anti-spam Web sites came under a sustained distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, an electronic assault during which the attackers use thousands of compromised personal computers to overwhelm a target with so much bogus traffic that the PCs can’t accommodate legitimate visitors.

The attacks were made possible by tens of thousands – perhaps millions – of computers infected by the recent e-mail virus known as the Storm worm.”

This is just one example but it explains how important it is for every PC to be properly protected. The Storm worm is now particularly ingenious in the way it works. It hit the internet at a time when they’re were particularly bad storms raging across Europe, which helped it spread, but it can be blocked by most commercial security products.

The problem here is that people will go out and spend €1000 on a PC, and then be reluctant to spend €30 or €40 on a decent internet security product. Even the free products like avast and avg provide good levels of protection. I don’t believe that people are that stingy, so surely the problem is a lack of awareness.

I’m still fairly new to the whole blogging thing, and one of the things I’ve read since I started this was that the blog title should be simple and relevant to the content.

This blog is all about making computer security simple and accessible to non-technical computer users. But it just occurred to me that it may seem like I’m saying that computer security is a simple area. That’s not the case at all. In fact there are layers and layers of complexity and specific areas of expertise within the overall “computer security” field.

The idea that you will make your computer or your network completely secure is nothing more than a pipedream. Sadly, there’s no such thing as Total Computer Security. What you can do though is implement security measures that provide an optimal level of protection. This idea of “Optimal Security” is discussed in more detail on my secureyourbusinessnow.com site, (see the blogroll), but basically it means looking at what you are trying to protect, the threats you are trying to protect from, and then deciding on the best security solutions for your needs.

So the optimal security level will vary from one company or even 1 PC to the next. If you have a PC used for your accounts, payroll, client details, etc, it is more critical than a PC used for web-browsing. That doesn’t mean you don’t implement security in some cases. There is a base level of security that should always be in place on any PC, (and unfortunately often isn’t!!!).

What it means though is that you don’t need to be a technical guru to protect your computers to a level where they are relatively safe from attack. In economic terms, you reach the point of diminishing marginal returns, where spending more money, time or effort will not give you sufficient return to make it worthwhile. It’s up to you to decide where that point is, and you do that by understanding your needs, the threats, and the solutions.

All of which doesn’t have to be that difficult, once you remove the hype and jargon, and focus more on SECURITY and less on COMPUTER.

Maybe I’m biased here because I just got a panic call from someone who’s lost a whole load of critical information, but…surely the most important security tool is not anti-virus software, or firewalls, or anti-spyware. It’s got to be backups.

There are any number of threats out there, and any number of technologies available to protect you from them, but at the end of the day, the warm cozy feeling of knowing that no matter what happens, all your critical data is nicely secured offsite is priceless.

That’s not to say you don’t need all the other stuff. Anyone who doesn’t have proper virus protection and a decent firewall in place nowadays is just crazy. But even with all these measures in place, bad stuff can still happen. Properly implemented and properly executed backups are the magic wand that will save the day and leave you looking like a hero. (The downside is that poorly implemented backups, that have missed out on some key information, or that haven’t been checked, could cost you your job, so make sure you get it right.)